What are the best practices for creating a culture of experimentation and learning?

The most valuable way you can "unleash creativity" is to give people clarity on "what's important and what we value" in the company. When these values are clear, everyone feels comfortable talking about, creating, and working together on new ideas. It's impossible to "be innovative" without purpose - and it's vision and values that free this creative power.

Engage as many of your workforce as possible in the creation of your purpose, mission, vision & core values - they will then "own" the output and be committed to the journey. This must be done within a framework, however, as you will need to steer the direction of travel. As the leader, it is correct that you "chose the star to chase" and then work with your people to develop the why - the purpose & benefit to the world, and the values and culture that will keep everyone true to the path. Together, you can define and refine your vision and values, then together you own the journey. Natural empowerment and ownership follows. Decisions can then be made at the level of the information, knowing they will be purpose led and always on the path.

Culture is the emergent environment which shapes individual and collective decisions, actions and beliefs. Often, when organisations look to understand culture, they fail to move past behavioural wants “We need to collaborate more.” “We need to be more inclusive.” Or they are just looking at values. These are important, but we need to look more systemic and understand how we can design/develop the interrelated levers such as: ➡️ Policy/process ➡️ Operating model/structure ➡️ The physical or virtual environment ➡️ Decision making ….. And more It's how these levers are designed and mutually supporting that enables your culture to emerge.

To modernize a quote from Nietzsche, "They who have a why to live can bear almost any how." Innovation and creativity are needed even more when times are tough. Understanding and sharing a common "Why" - the purpose, mission and values of an organization - helps to empower individuals and teams to experiment, try new things, and be willing to take risks (bear almost any how) in the direction of that shared vision.

Here are key things I focus on when nudging organizational cultures towards experimentation and learning: 1. Psychological Safety: A Foundation for Creativity, refers to a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, challenge, contribution & learning 2. Encouraging a Growth Mindset: resilience & willingness to take on challenges, learn from failures, and continuously seek improvement. 3. Diverse Perspectives: Diversity in thought and perspective is a powerful catalyst for creativity. Encouraging diverse opinions and backgrounds within a team leads to a richer pool of ideas and solutions.

In my opinion, the key points are being tolerant of mistakes and setting good examples. If your employees see that innovation and development attempts are rewarded constantly, they will be motivated to act. Another important point is showing tolerance to mistakes. Because if you're trying something new, mistakes are inevitable. And if employees sense that their potensial mistakes will be punished, they won't risk at all. This is the one thing you don't want...

Make experimentation, and inevitable failures, an option. Partial success and failure where we learn has value too and we must give appropriate recognition of people who are trying to solve particularly wicked problems. Important here that there are learning feedback loops, some sort of controlling mind for genuinely new work and that recognition can be given to those who have put effort into innovative evolutions.

Start with describing what performance success looks like, then define how it's measured and then identify the timeline and constraints involved (budget, resources, etc.). Then ask them to take charge and control, they drive the project on their schedule to meet the timeline all must work within. Place your trust openly, visibly, and communicate often and offer praise deserved, acknowledge their leadership to all (especially to leadership and the client!).

Creating a place in which everyone's voice is heard in the creative process takes effort. Some voices will automatically be suppressed in favor of louder voices. Making sure you structure the process so quieter voices are included can take the form of having people take five minutes to contribute their thoughts in writing before the discussion starts is simple but helps quieter people contribute. This may not be obvious but training people on unconscious biases can be revealing. For example, an authority bias in an organization shuts down more junior voices, who often have the most innovative ideas.

In an established organisation, especially a large one, you will almost certainly need to change the metrics that reward success/penalise failure. That implies a certain toleration of the inevitable failure that comes with experimentation, and an equal acceptance of the "Ferrari in the car park" that comes with exceptional performance. Corporate risk-aversion, internal politics and envy are your greatest obstacles. David Molian, Thought Leader, Criticaleye and Visiting Fellow, CRanfield School of Management,

Make sure team members have opportunities to work on cross-functional teams. This opens them up to different or colliding perspectives and broadens their thinking to include perspectives other than their own. When hiring look for candidates that will provide a cultural add (not a cultural "fit"). If your existing team is missing less mainstream voices, you won't have those voices in the innovation process representing those same voices in your customer base. For example, if your team is all women, your next hire should be a man. If your team doesn't include someone from another country, you are missing a global perspective. Hire to fill the gaps.

While collaboration within a team can be fostered through the team leader’s willingness and persistence, it is across departments and functions that collaborating becomes a bigger challenge. Often, the most radical - out of the box ideas, and frank feedback comes from someone who is from outside the team – whether it is stakeholders, internal customers, or just colleagues. Function leaders or Department heads can utilize scheduled events like open houses, lunch and learn, Ask me Anything sessions– which can create an informal setting without putting people ‘on-the-spot’. This will help them crowdsource innovative and collaborative ideas.

The beauty of diversity and inclusion when it comes to collaboration is that you widen the aperture of the picture to create new opportunities and awareness. Bringing more voices into the room means you have a better chance to represent the needs of your customers and stakeholders in new and innovative ways.

A willingness and openness to healthy debate and difficult conversations - without fear of reprisals - is critical for innovation, creativity and true collaboration and diversity to thrive. This starts at the top. Senior leaders must demonstrate that openness and build the requisite trust from their words and actions.

There is no question that fostering a climate of openness, respect and inclusion creates a more successful company. As a fully remote organization, we really know how to collaborate virtually. We utilize all the resources available to us and it just works beautifully.

It is important to make it safe to fail. Fear inhibits growth and innovation. It is important to ensure that not only senior leadership encourages innovation but that those leaders check in with first-line managers to foster the importance of creating a culture that supports taking calculated risks for the sake of learning and experimentation. Fail as quickly and cheaply as possible to create the learning that will enable future growth.

Transparency as a leader is huge here. Be willing to share you failures as much as your successes. Many times we learn more from those failures or bumps in the road. Allow others to learn from them as well and make it safe for them to own their own failures. If they believe it is safe to try new ideas and be creative even if it doesn't work out in a way we would consider successful, they will be willing to continue trying and experimenting.

The notion of psychological safety comes to mind when looking to drive behaviors that acknowledge and rewards experimenting and challenging. Amy Edmonson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe from interpersonal risk taking. In other words, I can speak up and be authentically be myself without fear of consequences from my team, my boss or leaders at the company. Organizations that prioritize psychological safety create space for people to speak up, but also test and challenge the status quo.

I agree with my colleagues who raised the issue of psychological safety, this is an essential part of creating a space for creativity and innovation, mainly because it allows people to make mistakes. But I would also add the issue of motivation, if innovation and pro activity is taken for granted and not rewarded and recognised, employees will have less motivation to think about creative ideas or solutions. Many times the issue is not a lack of innovation but rather a situation where senior manager fail to give their employees the credit.

Adopting a blended learning methodology would also be useful because the employees have different learning styles that work best for them. They may prefer the concrete experience(activists). In contrast, others learn faster through reflective observations(reflectors)and some focus more on the theoretical aspect of learning which is the abstract conceptualization, and finally, the pragmatist prefers practical experimentation.

Get the earlier steps right and this allows challenge & disruption. Get them wrong, or gloss over them, and challenge is challenging & challenged - it is not accepted and will cause tension, upset and dissent. Challenge needs to come from the right place - pure intent and within the defined cultural landscape. Disruption needs to have the overarching organisational purpose at its core, else it is just anarchy. I can challenge only if I invite challenge. You, the leader must ask for and embrace challenge as a precursor to creating a culture of positive challenge. I can only disrupt or accept disruption if it is aligned to our goal. Aligned disruption opens new paths to the summit of our collective purpose. Misaligned and we fall and fail.

Back to the 5 Why's (sorry to sound like a broken record!). When I am asked to conduct a "rush" training I ask the client what will happen if we don't do the training, what's the worst that will happen? From their response we can often drive down to a deeper root cause problem that may be process oriented more than people realize.

In my coaching of executives I encourage them to assess how much they and their teams are taking an “outside-in” approach, rather than an “inside-out” one with respect to their products and services for their customers. In other words, let the customer’s explicit and implicit needs guide the work and spend time with them instead of just working in a vacuum. Otherwise you could be “innovating” with creative and cool solutions but ones that don’t solve the right problem in the market. It’s easy to fall in love with your own ideas but they may not have any traction in offering value where it counts.

Making sure employees stay focused on creating value for customers requires a relentless focus on that message. Innovation without application is a waste. Client expectations are constantly changing. Teams need to stay connected to each client team member as often different team members have different needs. Innovation has to start with solving the right problem. Reclarifying goals at every step keeps teams from wandering off track. Ask why is that important, until the answer you get back doesn't change. Surprisingly, many teams skip the critical step of making sure they have a collective understanding of the real problem to solve.

Give consideration to how you can hear from those colleagues who might not have the confidence to speak out in meetings, particularly those where senior staff are present. Be creative and develop ways to include their thoughts without putting them ‘on-the-spot’ and develop a workplace culture that welcomes different perspectives. Colleagues shouldn’t feel they are putting themselves at risk by voicing views that challenge established ways of working. Innovation is more likely in organisations that don’t have a ‘that’s how we’ve always done it’ culture.

Every "new idea" has problems and challenges to overcome. The best way to get past this is to encourage people to iterate, give suggestions, and keep at it. Innovation is not a "spark of ideas" - it's a long slog of taking good ideas, working them out, and often putting thousands of hours into designs, iteration, customer testing, and improvement. The more you honor that process the more innovation and continuous improvement you'll see.

Deeds speak louder than words. Supporting and investing in employees can't only be about sending them to conferences or classes. Exceptional leaders engage their employees in thoughtful, open conversations about short- and long-term professional development goals and employ creative solutions to grow their team. Managers can help their employees identify skill or experience gaps and provide them with opportunities to learn. This could take the form of coaching/mentoring, shadowing more experienced co-workers, cross-training, stretch assignments, or committee leadership. If we're not making these investments in our own people, other employers will gladly take over. The keys to retention are engagement, growth, and recognition.

Budgeting and allocation of financial resources for implementation of various learning and development activities cannot be overemphasised. It is important that significant funds are made available to support innovation and promote blended learning methodologies which will contribute to achieving the company's business objectives and sustaining the core values.

Innovation and creativity is the heartbeat in the delivery of culturally aligned offerings that allow customers/clients and those who create an opportunity to feel a sense belonging and purpose. Leadership would be wise to foster and facilitate spaces that support personal risk to share, be genuine and truly authentic in the sharing of ideas, especially when the idea is not fully flushed out and allowing the team to co-create, design, deconstruct, rebuild and resettle with ideas. Demonstrate risk leadership, with the back drop of cultural awareness and emotional intelligence. Leadership vulnerability and willingness allows individuals to shine, win and showcase their talent/ideas.

Investing in your people starts with trust. People who know they aren't trusted, won't give their best. Finding the right balance of time and runway to give creatives to come up with new ideas while making sure customer timelines are met is an ever evolving dance. Unrelenting attention to making sure that balance is maintained is the only way to make sure the balance doesn't slip away. Partner creatives with people who get stuff done. Typically great idea people need execution people to meet deadlines. Done well, this is where truly great partnerships will net tenfold results. Jean Oelwang's book on Partnering is a great read on this topic.